‘Enough for what?’
‘Suppose… suppose you simply tell the Family that Rolfa has disappeared. You don’t know where, or why, but she’s always been odd, and she’s gone, somewhere. Now that would have nothing to do with the legal position of the Family in relation to the Consensus. It might not even have anything to do with… oh, I don’t know what to call it… genetic drift back towards the average, or whatever. Which is all they care about.’
‘You are a cold little fish, aren’t you?’ said Zoe.
‘Look, having Rolfa with you is not going to do your father any good either. If she’s a black mark against him now, she always will be. You’re the only one who cares about Rolfa. This is what she wants.’
Something in Zoe relented. ‘It’s not so easy, Ms Shibush, to watch a sister Slide away.’ She said it quietly. ‘Especially when you’re wondering why someone wants to give her such a good push.’
‘Don’t let her go! Just give her time.’
‘Give you time, you mean.’
‘Give her music time. The music is good.’
‘How long?’ Zoe asked abruptly.
Milena felt a prickling. ‘A year,’ she said. She thought she was overestimating.
Zoe leaned against the wall and chewed the inside of her cheek, looking out the window.
‘All right, Ms Shibush. All right.’ She rocked herself away from the wall. She looked at Rolfa, considered, and found that she had nothing to say. The broken door was still open. She walked to it and turned to Milena.
‘Why don’t I hate you?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Milena.
‘A year,’ said Zoe, warning her, and left.
Milena closed the door and started to shake. What had she done? How had she done it? Rolfa sat drinking quietly, staring at the bottle with a faraway smile, as if all of it had nothing to do with her. In a sense, it didn’t.
The next morning, Milena bundled up what music she had and took it to the Minister who ran the National Theatre. He was popularly known as the Zookeeper. Even he called himself that at times.
Walking through the upper floor of the Zoo, Milena felt as small and as hard as a nut. There was a groomed young man whose job it was to stop people seeing the Minister. Milena could not afford the luxury of disliking him.
She did not say that she had found an undiscovered genius. She said that she was harbouring a fugitive and that she felt the Minister should know. She explained why. The reason was that the creature was talented. She left the evidence of that talent, the music, as if it were part of a briefing for a policy decision. The young man took a stern line. Why had she not come earlier? He would make sure the Minister saw the papers and attended to her case. He patted them at the corners to make a neat package of them on his otherwise empty table.
Milena devoted the rest of the day to Rolfa. She bought a pack lunch with the last of their money. Roast beef sandwiches and oranges and sticks of celery — things they both could eat. She took Rolfa, who was content and distant, on a ride in an omnibus to Regents Park. The bus stop called it Chao Li Gardens.
It was getting cooler, and there were high, racing clouds in the sky. The leaves were beginning to change colour already, going yellow at the edges, with brown spots. In the centre of the park, there was a rose garden with ornamental ponds. Milena and Rolfa walked beside the artificial waterways. There was a smell of still, dark water. Ducks landed in it, sliding to a halt.
Milena explained what she had done, and Rolfa appeared to be unmoved. Rolfa threw bits of her sandwiches to the ducks on the water. Overhead a flight of greylag geese passed, on their way to the Thames estuary from Iceland. The world had been saved.
Rolfa watched the geese overhead. ‘Everything moves,’ she said. ‘You wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That’s how he was built. So we don’t really know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds.’
Rolfa turned and flicked one of her grins towards Milena, as if apologising for what she had just said. ‘Thank you for trying,’ said Rolfa. ‘But I really don’t mind the silence.’ She was admonishing Milena, ever so gently. ‘The music comes out of the silence. I don’t mind if it goes back in. We come out of the silence…’ Her voice trailed off and she traced an arch with her hand. We go back into the silence too.
What is she saying? thought Milena. That she will go away?
‘We have a year, Rolfa.’
‘But we don’t have any food,’ said Rolfa. She threw the last morsel of bread to the ducks. They began to walk back towards the bus stop.
And suddenly Rolfa turned and attacked a rose. She snatched the stem despite the thorns and twisted it, breaking it off. Maybe it was the clumsiness, maybe it was the anger, but Milena was shocked without quite knowing why.
Rolfa turned, and holding the rose perfectly upright, gave it to Milena. She said something slurred and embarrassed. It took a moment for Milena to realise that she had said, ‘A rose for a rose.’
She shouldn’t have been able to do that, thought Milena. That is a public rose. If Rolfa had been anyone else, the viruses would have stopped her taking it. Rolfa is immune as well.
Milena turned the rose round and round in her hand. It was an old-fashioned rose, a very pale pink marbled with magenta. Rosa mundi, whispered the viruses. The petals had gone brown at the edges and had curled back to reveal a fresher core. It must have been recently watered by the gardeners. Fat pearls of water clung to it. Milena thought she ought to be embarrassed being seen walking with a stolen, public rose. Then she found she didn’t care, and carried it boldly. It bobbed on its long stem as if made out of lead, as if heavy with meaning. The public rose was a private valediction.
On the bus back home, Rolfa’s face was smiling, sad and faraway. Milena found herself dunking over and over: Rolfa don’t go, Rolfa don’t go.
Their little room at the Shell was cool and in shadow by the time they returned. September was declining rapidly. Rolfa won’t mind the winter, thought Milena, she’ll like the cold. If she’s still here, said another part of her mind. Milena went up onto the roof of the Shell to sunbathe, to kill her hunger pangs. Cilia brought Rolfa some soup and sausages. Cilia slipped them both into the Zoo to see Madam Butterfly. Rolfa no longer could buy tickets. Her smile was rapt, with the music, with the singing, with the staging, and her eyes were famished and glistening. If only they had let us be ourselves, Milena thought.
The next day Milena tried to rejoin Love’s Labour’s Lost.
She was told at one of the information desks that the director had died. Quite suddenly. Thirty-five. Time-expired. The cast were in mourning. They had asked to have the production discontinued. They didn’t want to work with anyone else. They can’t face going back, thought Milena. They can’t face going back to sleepwalking Shakespeare.
It was just like the play, at the end. Welcome Mercade, Mr Death. You interrupt our merriment. The King your Father is…
Dead, for my life.
It’s a design flaw, thought Milena. We shouldn’t have to the. She thought of the director, called him Harry in her mind. She remembered his feverish eyes. You knew you were going, Harry. This was your last leap. A lifetime of sleepwalking, of making other people sleepwalk, broke you. And then you were free. Harry, if I ever direct a play, she promised him, I will do it as you did.